Word: henequen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world's great powers by expropriating their oil holdings in Mexico, he scared the striped pants off U.S. diplomats, who feared that he was setting up a Communist-type state right next door. At one swoop in 1938, Cárdenas took over 395,000 acres of henequen (fiber) land in Yucatán and turned it into a vast government collective farm. It was the nearest thing to a Soviet-style Sovkhoz (state farm) outside the U.S.S.R. Cardenas called it the Gran Ejido to distinguish it from numerous smaller semi-collectives in Mexico's ejidal system...
Since then, the Gran Ejido has been sacrosanct in Mexican politics. No public official dared to say that it was an abysmal failure. Profits from the henequen were raked in by corrupt bureaucrats, while henequen growers and their families lived on barely $1 a week. Mexico's total production, despite a $1.900,000 annual subsidy started by President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines in 1953 (TIME, April 13, 1953), dropped steadily. Last year it hit a low of 450,000 bales, compared with the World War I high of 1,000,000 bales...
...cigarettes and a packet of food, then climbed into a guarded boxcar drawn up on a spur. At Manzanillo, 600 dark miles later, the convicts would embark in a troopship headed up the coast. After that, for unending years, life for them will be only the salt and henequen of the Three Marys...
Sharks are the guards and ocean waves the walls at Mexico's Islas Tres Marias prison camp, a trio of tiny, sun-baked islands about 70 miles off Mexico's west coast. The 1,072 inmates sweat out their lives in dazzling white salt pits, tend henequen fields and weave rope. They live in straw-roofed huts; there are no iron bars, but escape is next to impossible. In cells at Mexico City's Black Palace Prison, coldhearted murderers weep like little children at the prospect of banishment to the Three Marys...